Welcome to Wal-Mart!
Just a reminder: this is what our ease and comfort are based on -- someone doing work like this:

From the Guardian: A worker prepares a cotton gin in Mumbai. India is the second largest exporter of the ﬁbre after China, the recipient of around 60% of India’s cotton exports.

A Worker Writes
Roy Mayall spotlights the ever-growing inequalities in our best of all possible worlds -- disparities that will only grow vastly greater as the world's elites stoke bogus deficit panics to "justify" their shredding of the last remaining tiny mitigations against their brute power. From the London Review of Books:

Adam Crozier, the retiring chief executive [of Royal Mail], received more than £2.4m in the year 2009-10. With bonuses and pensions that figure rises to £3.5 million. ... I earn £8.98 an hour. I work a 20-hour week. I’d like to work more but there are no full-time jobs available. My basic pay is £177.28 a week, before deductions. That’s about £9200 a year. That means that I would have to work for nearly 380 years to earn as much as Adam Crozier earned last year.

Fair enough. Adam Crozier obviously has 380 times my needs. He must have a house that is 380 times the size of mine. He is 380 times taller. Maybe he has 380 stomachs to fill. Perhaps his dick is 380 times bigger than mine and he needs 380 partners to service it. He must have 380 times the intellectual capacity as his brain is clearly 380 times more developed than mine. His value to the world is 380 times greater.

Of course, the truth of the matter is that our elites really do think like this. They really believe their value to the world is immeasurably greater than any memeber of the common rabble -- or indeed, the common rabble as a whole. (And this case only deals with an executive in the UK; the disparities in the United States are much greater.) That's why they find it so very easy to kill vast numbers of people and grind others into the dirt. The rabble is just a herd, whose individual lives have no value, except as they can be exploited by those who really matter.

An Attack of Giantism
Not that anyone cares, but more evidence has been found to refute the Obama Administration's farcical claim that it was uninvolved in a cruise missile attack that killed 52 people in Yemen last year, more than half of them women and children. The Independent reports:

A US cruise missile armed with cluster ammunition was used in an attack in Yemen in December which resulted in the deaths of 52 people, more than half of them women and children, according to a human rights watchdog.

The Yemeni government insisted their forces alone carried out the strike on an al-Qa'ida training camp in the Abyan region. US authorities backed the claim that insurgents had been attacked but officially denied direct involvement in the attack.

However, Amnesty International has now released photographs of missile parts from the attack which appear to show that it was a BGM-109D Tomahawk cruise missile designed to be launched from a warship or submarine. Further images reveal BLU 97 A/B cluster munitions which spray steel fragments for 150 meters along with burning zirconium for igniting buildings. The Yemeni government does not possess cruise missiles, which are part of the arsenal of US Navy vessels patrolling off the Horn of Africa and in the Arabian Sea.

...A Yemeni parliamentary committee investigating the raid at al-Ma'jalah concluded that 41 of the dead were civilians, 21 of them children and 14 women. Survivors denied any links with insurgents.

Again, what does it matter? The real people, the 380-foot giants, kicked over an anthill, and a few ants died. Boo hoo. Big whoop. Is our giant Peace Laureate supposed to concern himself with trivia like that? Of course, such actions only stir up a few ants here and there to try to nip at the giants' heels -- but so what? The worst they might do is kill a few of our ants now and then; meanwhile, the giants can hype the threat to fill their pockets with more war loot and expand their power and privilege.

Deadly Combinations
As you might imagine, Arthur Silber has one of the most cogent observations on the "Helen Thomas affair." I won't excerpt it here, because that would dilute the unfolding of his sharp, satirical take; however, I will offer just one, more general comment from his conclusion, for it sums up quite well the essence of the above items, and much else about our modern world:

For me, one of the more gut-wrenching aspects of today's monstrous culture, a culture that kills each and every manifestation of empathy, understanding and compassion with relentlessly systematic determination, is the combination of unending destruction, cruelty, violence and murder with the most abysmally wretched depths of stupidity.